“I came back to speak to the two women while Cobb was shouting something at them and at me. Mrs. Blaine claimed he’d read too much in Mrs. Teller letting him help her about the gardens. He must have said something to her, and Mrs. Teller told him he was a married man and she wanted nothing to do with him.” Satterthwaite paused. “So he killed her.” He examined the Thermos as if it had just appeared on his desk and he’d never seen it before, avoiding Rutledge’s eyes. “I’d have liked five minutes alone with him. It would have been worth it.” Then he looked up. “I could never understand Peter Teller walking away from her at the war’s end. That’s if he wasn’t dead. She was sure he was. We all believed it. So it made sense that he’d come back, finally, to make his peace and tell her his reasons. His lame leg, for one. And she sent him away with a flea in his ear, because she had a pride of her own, did Florence Teller.”

He set the Thermos aside and moved a little in his chair.

“She must have told Cobb when he came to do a little work what had happened between herself and Teller. And he killed her then, because he knew that whatever she was saying now in the heat of anger and hurt, in the end Florence would go back to her husband.” Looking away at the square of window, seeing the darkness no longer pitch-black, he went on. “I didn’t want her killer to be one of us. I wanted it to be Teller. But it wasn’t.”

“That’s a very good reconstruction,” Rutledge said after a moment. “It makes a strong case for Lawrence Cobb as the murderer. But it doesn’t explain the cane.”

“That must have been what Cobb saw as he came up the walk. How he knew Teller had been there. Where Teller had dropped it when she cast him off. And she must have left it there, in the event Teller came back for it. She wouldn’t have to see him again.”

“And what does Cobb have to say to this? Does he still deny he killed her, or has he admitted what he’d done?”

“By the time his wife and her mother had left, he was in a state. He demanded I send for you, but I told him it was no use, the evidence was there, and we had to go forward. The truth was, I couldn’t bear the sight of him, I wanted him out of Hobson where I couldn’t lay hands to him. I think he must have seen that in my face, because when I told him he was going to Thielwald, he came quietly and gave me no trouble.”

A silence fell.